Tags: Anonymous

Barrett Lancaster Brown is a writer and activist who possesses a unique combination of ability, courage, wit and determination. This resume of personality traits turned him into a threatening individual once he decided to direct much of that energy against the prevailing corrupt status quo. This is also why he’s one of the roughly roughly 2.4 million Americans locked up within these United States; many of them for non-crimes.

The Feds went after Barrett Brown in the same manner in which they went after Aaron Swartz (tactics that led to the suicide of the latter). They came out with a bunch of trumped up charges, including that of copying and pasting a link (that charge was later dropped), and threatened him with 105 years in jail.

Brown has now served over two years in federal penitentiary without bail and his sentencing is tomorrow. He faces 10 years in jail for basically exposing the shady relationship between intelligence contractors and the U.S. government.

The following quote written on a piece of cardboard from the ongoing protests in Venezuela basically summarizes how the oligarchs, or the 0.01%, and their political henchmen rule in all countries around the world at the moment. Then theycry like little welfare babies when people criticize their behavior.

Powerful stuff:

They speak like MarxRule like Stalin And live like Rockefellers While the people suffer

I first read about the Million Mask March about a month ago and thought it was something to keep an eye on, but not yet interesting enough to post on. With a month and a half left to go, it has been gaining enough momentum for me to highlight this event.

While the main focus of the march centers around a gathering at the National Mall in the District of Criminals in Washington D.C., the plan is for hundreds of marches all over the world on November 5, which is Guy Fawkes Day. A video explaining the event and encouraging people to unite wants it to be…

Barrett Brown is one of those figures that immediately captured my attention after first learning about him while watching the Anonymous documentary We are Legion.I soon realized that he had been incarcerated a mere three months prior to me serendipitously stumbling upon the film. It wasn’t difficult to see that he must have been onto something very, very big for the Feds to go after him so aggressively. You don’t charge a person with 105 years in prison merely as revenge for a youtube video in which you threaten an FBI agent. No, there was something much deeper going on here.

It was only after the Edward Snowden revelations that I realized exactly what was going on. As we all know by now, Snowden’s last employer was technology consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. As soon as I read that, I remembered that the first person to bring Booz Allen to my attention as a nefarious corporate entity was none other than Barrett Brown. Barrett was focused, indeed obsessed, with the shady and dangerous relationship between defense/intelligence contractors and the U.S. government. He was getting too close to unearthing things that some of the most powerful people in the world didn’t want to see the light of day, and so he was silenced and put in a cage. Just as tyrants have always historically done to those who are smarter and more courageous and capable than they could ever be.

Anyone that looks at the Barrett Brown case with an unbiased eye will soon realize that the government is engaged in a political witch-hunt, much like what happened to internet prodigy Aaron Swartz. The case is so preposterous that Barrett was beginning to garner considerable media attention. One example of the absurdity of his case was recently highlighted by Vice in an article that points out:

Keep in mind, Barrett is facing a 45-year sentence under one indictment that alleges he shared a link to illegally obtained, hacked information. In contrast, the individual actually found guilty of hacking the data is serving a sentence of ten years.

The government of course doesn’t want people to know about this sort of thing, and so the prosecution recently requested a gag order from Texas district court judge Sam Lindsay. Sadly, last week this request was granted (check out the gag order itself here). Kevin Gosztola of Firedog Lake summarized the dangers of this gag order better than I ever could. He writes:

As the Free Barrett Brown group highlights on its website, at stake is the right to link, because one of the offenses stems from Brown’s decision to share a link to something released online from the Stratfor emails. It also implicates the First Amendment, as Brown is charged with concealing information related to journalistic sources and his own work products. It also raises issues of press freedom and selective prosecution, since it appears that in the three indictments handed down against Brown the government is targeting him for daring to expose the operations of private security and intelligence companies.

The gag order was not pursued to protect the interests of the accused. It was pursued to limit the flow of information to the press because the government has known from the beginning that what they were doing looked like vindictive or selective prosecution.

Gagging Brown and his defense team has the effect of preventing those participating in the trial from speaking to the press about the trial until after the trial has concluded. Once the trial is over, the press may have little interest in what Brown or his lawyers have to say. This means the public is deprived of the opportunity to challenge the government’s handling of the trial when it most matters, especially if the handling is abusive and in violation of Brown’s rights.

It’s ironic and disturbing that in a case where press freedom is at stake, the defendant and his lawyers have been barred from talking to the press. The prosecution asked for a gag order in part because they said articles about Brown’s case contained inaccuracies, but pointed to no articles to prove their point. Seemingly, the problem was the articles were too accurate, and therefore making the prosecution’s case look bad. The fact remains, Brown is being prosecuted for conduct that is central to journalism, and the charges related to linking should be thrown out immediately.

With all that in mind, I provide some excerpts below from the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine, which profiles Barrett. The article is certainly not a one-sided celebration of him, and in fact I question the author’s undue focus on his drug abuse, considering substance abuse is one of the most common traits exhibited by almost every great writer that has ever lived. In any event, the story will hopefully get Barrett’s case more public attention in the face of this absurd gag order. From Rolling Stone:

Encountering Barrett Brown’s story in passing, it is tempting to group him with other Anonymous associates who have popped up in the news for cutting pleas and changing sides. Brown’s case, however, is a thing apart. Although he knew some of those involved in high-profile “hacktivism,” he is no hacker.His situation is closer to the runaway prosecution that destroyed Aaron Swartz, the programmer-activist who committed suicide in the face of criminal charges similar to those now being leveled at Brown. But unlike Swartz, who illegally downloaded a large cache of academic articles, Brown never broke into a server; he never even leaked a document.His primary laptop, sought in two armed FBI raids, was a miniature Sony netbook that he used for legal communication, research and an obscene amount of video-game playing. The most serious charges against him relate not to hacking or theft, but to copying and pasting a link to data that had been hacked and released by others.

“What is most concerning about Barrett’s case is the disconnect between his conduct and the charged crime,” says Ghappour. “He copy-pasted a publicly available link containing publicly available data that he was researching in his capacity as a journalist. The charges require twisting the relevant statutes beyond recognition and have serious implications for journalists as well as academics. Who’s allowed to look at document dumps?”

There’s an interesting trend happening in America today. A trend characterized by old, authoritarian, formerly “highly respected” figures in society becoming so confused and concerned that the zeitgeist of the nation is moving away from them, that they are overcome by dementia and publicly lash out like spoiled children in increasingly irrational manner. Two of my favorite examples of such behavior are Senator John McCain and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Now we can add another character to the list, former CIA and NSA head Michael Hayden. Amongst other things, here is what he said about Snowden supporters:

Nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twenty-somethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.

First of all, this is a typical response from a person who cannot win an argument. Appeal to emotion or engage in bizarre personal attacks. We saw Chris Christie desperately do this the other day when he attacked libertarians for “thinking,” in a pathetic attempt to create some perverted neocon buzz about himself ahead of 2016. However, even more hilariously, here is a picture of Michael Hayden.

Image from Washington Post (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Wait, who hasn’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years? I’m sure the ladies are rioting in the streets to get a date with this guy. From the Washington Post:

For those unfamiliar with Jeremy Hammond, he is the 28-year-old web developer accused of hacking Stratfor and subsequently leaking the information to Wikileaks. For this, he faces a 30-years-to-life sentence. Jeremy is currently being held without bail at the Manhattan Correctional Center, a federal jail in lower Manhattan in solitary confinement. Incredibly, the federal judge who is hearing his case, Lorraine Preska, has refused to step aside despite the fact that her husband was a victim in the hack Hammond is accused of. Now that’s a justice system!

Well Hammond recently penned a letter from solitary in which he discusses the rampant corruption in the criminal justice system, the very dangerous Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the tragic death and over-prosectution of Aaron Swartz. His character really comes through in the fact that he barely even discusses his own case, despite the awful situation he finds himself in. So without further ado, below is his entire letter, with my favorite passages highlighted.

February 20, 2013

Jeremy Hammond on Aaron Swartz and the Criminalization of Digital Dissent

The tragic death of internet freedom fighter Aaron Swartz reveals the government’s flawed “cyber security strategy” as well as its systematic corruption involving computer crime investigations, intellectual property law, and government/corporate transparency. In a society supposedly based on principles of democracy and due process, Aaron’s efforts to liberate the internet, including free distribution of JSTOR academic essays, access to public court records on PACER, stopping the passage of SOPA/PIPA, and developing the Creative Commons, make him a hero, not a criminal. It is not the “crimes” Aaron may have committed that made him a target of federal prosecution, but his ideas – elaborated in his “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto” – that the government has found so dangerous. The United States Attorney’s aggressive prosecution, riddled with abuse and misconduct, is what led to the death of this hero. This sad and angering chapter should serve as a wake up call for all of us to acknowledge the danger inherent in our criminal justice system.

Aaron’s case is part of the recent aggressive, politically-motivated expansion of computer crime law where hackers and activists are increasingly criminalized because of alleged “cyber-terrorist” threats. The United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, whose office is prosecuting me and my co-defendants in the Lulzsec indictment, has used alarmist rhetoric such as the threat of an imminent “Pearl Harbor like cyber attack” to justify these prosecutions. At the same time the government routinely trains and deploys their own hackers to launch sophisticated cyber attacks against the infrastructure of foreign countries, such as the Stuxnet and Flame viruses, without public knowledge, oversight, declarations of war, or consent from international authorities. DARPA, US Cyber Command, the NSA, and numerous federally-contracted private corporations openly recruit hackers to develop defensive and offensive capabilities and build Orwellian digital surveillance networks, designed not to enhance national security but to advance U.S. imperialism. They even attend and speak at hacker conferences, such as DEFCON, offer to bribe hackerspaces for their research, and created the insulting “National Civic Hacker Day” – efforts which should be boycotted or confronted every step of the way.

If you watched the excellent Anonymous documentary We are Legion, you will be familiar with Barrett Brown. The interview below is from March 2011, but I found it really interesting since in it Barrett cryptically discusses his potential future arrest; an event that ultimately took place in September 2012. When asked about him being targeted for arrest he states amusingly:

I mean Texans and indictments…it’s like a Texas Bar Mitzvah. My dad was indicted, you know, I have friends that have been indicted, have gone to prison…it happens.

There is a Free Barrett Brown twitter account if you have any interest in following his story further.

What makes this story even better is that Mr. Stangl was the guy who posted a video in 2009 imploring Computer Science majors to join the FBI. Makes sense. I guess you need a lot of people to keep tabs on the sheeple’s communications 24/7. Move along folks…nothing to see here. Your government loves you. Now go get on food stamps, watch some football and shut up.